Offensive Coordinator Kevin Gilbride

Offensive Coordinator Kevin Gilbride on preparing for the Cowboys.

Q: How tough is it to prepare for a team that you know, but you also know thatthey’re going to come out and probably do different things in week one?A: It’s a little more complex than usual because obviously the start of the year, they’veseen what we do. We’ve had some success. There’s going to be the natural modificationsor adjustments that take place, but here it’s been made a little bit more challengingbecause you’ve got two new corners, so now you’re trying to incorporate what yousaw in preseason and what they did to us schematically last year. What are the normaladjustments and changes that are going to take place? Well what is going to take placebecause of the presence of those two corners that they’ve invested a lot of money to get,so you’re gambling. You got to have enough answers so ‘if they take this approach, we’regoing to do this.’ If they take another approach, we’ll do something different, but to bequite honest, you don’t know and so we’ll wait and see. You’re playing the odds or yourhunches that they’re going to do what we think and devise your game plan accordingly,but you certainly have in your hip pocket the ability to go to something else if they’redoing something much radically different than what we anticipate.

Q: In the two games that you played them last year, Hakeem and Victor combinedfor 500 yards receiving. Do you sit there and say try and stop us?A: It’s funny. The first game, they had a very different approach than what they did the second game. You have your base defense, but they committed very much to a lot ofman coverage and a lot of doubling of Victor and Hakeem and basically said you’ve got win somewhere else and it got even more radical at the end where they just looked like punt, where you’re punting and they got viced up on Vic and that’s when really Jake Ballard made two great big plays for us that enabled us to come back and win the game. The second game, they still played man, but not nearly as much. The percentage wasn’t and the doubling, when they played man, was the same but it was a much, much lower percentage and it was much more zone and a more conservative approach and let those great pass rushers, if you can hold the ball a little bit, they have some tremendous, tremendous pass rushers that maybe they can get to the quarterback and have some success that way. We started off the game and we played great, but then we slowed down in the third quarter and it looked like their approach was winning and we were only up 21-14, I don’t remember. Then we made the big catch and that changed the momentum again. It brought it back to our side, but it was looking like maybe that different way of going about defending us was working because we didn’t do much the third quarter.

Q: Can you talk about the job Sean Locklear has done at left tackle and Beatty andBrewer?A: Sean, I won’t say has been a surprise, but he’s been what we’ve hoped. You bring himin here, hopefully he’s going to be your third and he’s going to be your swing tackle.With William out the entire preseason, all of a sudden he moved up to the startingposition and has played real well. He hasn’t hurt us in the pass game at all. His protection has been excellent. He’s been one of the better performers in pass protection. He’s stilllearning some of the things with the run game the way we do it, so I think he’ll get betterand better, but he’s been a bona fide pro. We haven’t fallen off because when we’veerred, it’s not been something that he did that hurt us, so I’ve been very, very pleasedwith him. Obviously William coming back is a huge factor for us to have some depth andthen play it out. This is like, I hate to say it, but it’s like his first exhibition game, but ofcourse except it’s for real and so you’re going to be tentative watching how he plays andwatching him today, he was excellent at practice and he volunteered to do some scoutwork so he can get some quality work against Osi and those guys and he looked prettygood. So that was an encouraging sign and then James Brewer has just been in and outand hurt and we’ll see where he’s at health-wise before we make any decisions.

Q: Did you guys ever consider flipping Locklear and Diehl?A: We did. We did. Very much so, but right now Sean is playing very well, so he’s beenreally as good as anybody we’ve had… pass pro up there and that way we can protect tothe other side and we’ve been doing that.

Q: Do you have any idea what you’re going to get from the running game?A: It’s something we’ve been striving to get, there’s no question about it, and we had acouple big runs, which was encouraging, but there really wasn’t the rhythm that you’relooking for. We got it the second half with the second unit, but we didn’t get it with thefirst group. What they were doing defensively in the beginning of the game, they werebasically challenging us to throw and we had some opportunities and we misfired on acouple of third and short. We did get two cracks and we were trying to seal everybodyoff and get outside and we didn’t get anything. We lost yardage. I never felt like we gotin a rhythm with the first group, so we were very disappointed in our performance. Iknow all of us were. We had hoped to come out of it feeling really good. O.K., we’reright where we need to be and exactly the opposite happened. I just think it was one ofthose days where we just didn’t make enough plays. Usually with the first group, at leastthe way we’ve been, sooner or later we get it going and they’ve been very, very resilientand we’ve come back from whatever the circumstances and I wouldn’t believe thatwould’ve happened in that game, but you only had one quarter and you were done. It wasdisappointing the way we played last week.

Q: How has he progressed coming back from the knee injury?A: Good. He’s a consummate pro. He’s always going to know exactly what to do. He’salways going to be technically very, very sound. He’s very dependable. You can trustthat he’ll do the right thing and right now, there’s no evidence that there’s any residuallimitations because of his injury. Anything we’ve seen has been very positive from him.

Q: What kind of dynamic does Martellus Bennett present? What was he able toshow in the preseason?A: I think that he’s raw for a guy that’s been in the league, but he’s got a lot of potential.He’s got great passion. He wants to be good. He’s got all the ingredients to be a verygood player for us and I think it’s just a matter of getting acclimated. He missed thewhole spring and so that really hurt him not going through the OTAs and everythingelse, but he’s a hard-working physically-talented guy that wants to be good and those areusually pretty good starting points.